An HTML-Form-Driven Approach to Reverse Engineering of Relational Databases to Ontologies

Abstract

The migration of the Deep Web to the Semantic Webcalls for reverse engineering of relational databases toontologies. However, there exist few approaches thatconsider an ontology as the target for reverse engineering.The existing approaches are faced with two mainproblems. First, they can require more information abouta relational database than it is possible to provide inpractice. Second, they can make unrealistic assumptionsabout the relational database; e.g. the relational databaseis in 3NF. As an attempt to resolve these problems, wepropose a novel approach. Rather than analyzing arelational schema, tuples, or user queries to build anontology, our approach takes advantage of HTML forms popular user-friendly interface to access relationaldatabases on the Web today. By analyzing the forms, ourapproach can deliver benefits that could not otherwise beachieved with the existing approaches. These benefits aretwofold. First, only minimal information about therelational database is required. Second, the relationaldatabase can be bad-designed, optimized and denormalized.